You know those quiet residential streets, full of parked cars, kids playing, people walking their dogs?
Then one day Waze realizes that cutting through there saves 3 little minutes… and boom: it becomes a mini urban highway out of nowhere.
And who takes the heat? Us, the ones who edit the map and start seeing (or hearing) the complaints.
It creates that classic conflict:
“I’m just mapping reality” “But this street clearly wasn’t meant to become a traffic corridor”
Do you ever feel like giving the map a little “tweak” to stop the flow? You bet.
But then comes the editor’s conscience: if the street is open and legal, we can’t just make up restrictions or change things just to block a route.
At the same time, there’s the other side: sometimes the road is classified higher than it should be, turns aren’t mapped correctly, details that make Waze think it’s a great alternative… when in practice it’s just a narrow neighborhood street and often one full of parked cars.
The line between faithful map and real impact on people’s lives isn’t as simple as it seems.
I want to hear from you: when Waze starts turning a residential street into a shortcut, do you just ensure the map is technically perfect… or have you been in situations where you needed to bring the issue to a larger community discussion?
Allan,
I didn’t quite understand your dilemma 
If everything is mapped correctly and Waze finds the best route, it’s doing its job, thankfully! Before Waze (the younger folks won’t know what that was like), finding a street without traffic to take a shortcut was like finding a gold mine, but soon other people would find it too and then the party was over lol
Now, if this is what’s happening: “the road is classified higher than it should be, turns are not well mapped,” then we are failing and creating things that don’t exist.
We shouldn’t try to use “workarounds” to create a scenario that doesn’t exist, for better or worse, but remember that even if I say a normal road is a primary road, what still counts is the mathematical calculation validating everything.
But if you want to share a specific problem, share it with us here and we’ll put our heads together 
It was just a joke 
A relative in Juazeiro mentioned that after the roadworks in the city, traffic has increased significantly on some roads. Waze started sending drivers on a detour right through his street — a street that until recently didn’t even show up on the map… and I was the one who created it!
I joked with him that, since the peace and quiet is gone, at least he can set up a coconut water stand for the people on the detour. hehehe
There are several studies that analyze the impact of GPS on roads that were not planned to handle large volumes of traffic. This scenario can be explained by the Nash Equilibrium: each driver follows the indicated route because it is the best individual option, but when everyone makes this same choice, the end result is worse for everyone.
In the not-so-distant past, on most streets you could only travel on foot or by cart. Patience…
In scenarios like this, I see two relevant questions:
- Is traffic permitted on the affected roads?
- Is the road type (street, primary (arterial/collector)) properly defined?
If traffic is permitted on a given road and Waze routes users through it, supposedly disrupting local traffic, this is not a problem with the app, but with public authorities and their traffic planning.
Regarding road classification, that is where we enter the realm of subjectivity. There is no objective definition that makes it possible to differentiate between local, arterial, and collector roads in 100% of cases.
So, to answer the question, the only change I would make to solve a problem like this would be to change the type of a road that, in my opinion, was not properly classified.
I think similarly, but I’d add one point: there’s a difference between being allowed to drive through and being a suitable road to become a main route.
If the street is open and legal, it’s not the editor’s job to “forcefully” hold back traffic. We can’t use the map to make up for road planning failures.
On the other hand, many of these cases get worse because the map is “too optimistic.” Narrow streets, full of parked cars, speed bumps, poor geometry… and on the map, it looks like a perfect collector road. In those cases, it’s worth reviewing carefully:
Without inventing restrictions, but also without sugarcoating reality.
And when everything is technically correct and it still becomes a heavy shortcut, I think it’s definitely valid to bring it to the community for discussion. Sometimes the map just reveals an urban problem that already existed — and the solution doesn’t lie solely in editing.